Its Wednesday now. 24 Hours after my presentation, which actually worked out well, but as Doug noticed I was prepping my presentation for Tuesday on Monday and didn’t allow me the time to see any other presentations. So my visibility during Monday on the UKOUG ICC grounds where nil. So in the end I skipped it all on Monday.
Tuesday
I was “scarred as hell” that one of my demo’s wouldn’t work out they way they should, or even worse, my laptop would brake down like the one from my Dutch peer Bernhard De Cock Buning. If I had allowed myself I would have attended Bernard’s presentation on Monday. It was the first time I embedded demo’s into my presentation and had a grant total of 8 examples to demonstrate.
Anyway, my presentation went far better than I would have expected although I run out of time a little bit due to much information. It was a new presentation and I hadn’t have the time to actually test run it for a life audience, so I had no idea how I would do regarding the time frame.
The presentation was an introduction into the fun stuff you can do while making use of XMLDB features and/or combining it with some functionality from other database core features and mainly about interfacing and/or how to annoy your DBA, doing stuff you normally should not be able to do, like writing or selecting some data from the outside world.
After my presentation on Tuesday I attended Mark Bobak’s “Introduction to Locks and Enqueues”, John King’s “Can I Make XML Go Faster?” and Jonathan Lewis’ “Beginners’ Guide to Statspack / AWR”.
After the Presentation
Mark Bobak’s presentation was up to speed, although I think Mark’s presentation didn’t go as he wanted it to be. There was an annoying pop-up during every slide change, which didn’t really help during his presentation under those hot spotlights in that big room, called Hall 1.
I really enjoyed John’s presentation during UKOUG 2007, so I thought, I gave it a shot and chair this session. John is a professional trainer and has, just like Mark btw, a lot of onsite experience. I really like the way John is presenting and the presentation went well. I noticed, being an XMLDB geek anyway, that he did a lot off hard work beforehand to come up with valiable pointers in how you should tread/design your XML data to be more performent.
Jonathan’s presentation was as always of high quality, although this one I could have actually skipped. Nothing new here, so yeah, this was actually beginners stuff. I was happy to see though that my way of dealing with statspack data / awr reports, at least by Jonathan’s standards, was the way to go. Always keep statspack report data in perspective, into context.
MTV?
In the evening, I was invited to attend an Oracle ACE dinner. Among others, I met up with Mark Rittman and Steven Feuerstein. After the main course, the effort I had made to prep the presentation really got to me, so I had to skip the rest of it. Back in my Hotel room, I think, it only took only about 15 minutes to fall asleep… and that ended my second day at the ICC UKOUG Conference.
I did well during my presentation. Not only that, I slept well, despite an annoying Lion which was watching MTV on my TV, but more on that later…
😎
